Several supervised learning algorithms are suited to classify instances into a multiclass value space. MultiNomial Logit (MNL) is recognized as a robust classifier and is commonly applied within the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) domain. Unfortunately, to date, it is unable to handle huge feature spaces typical of CRM applications. Hence, the analyst is forced to immerse himself into fe...

We introduce the Mondrian kernel, a fast random feature approximation to the Laplace kernel. It is suitable for both batch and online learning, and admits a fast kernel-width-selection procedure as the random features can be re-used efficiently for all kernel widths. The features are constructed by sampling trees via a Mondrian process [Roy and Teh, 2009], and we highlight the connection to Mon...

Web directory hierarchy is critical to serve user’s search request. Creating and maintaining such directories without human experts involvement requires good classification of web documents. In this paper, we explore web page classification using keywords from documents as attributes and using the random forest learning methods. Our initially results are promising that the random forests learni...

this study aims at analyzing spatial pattern and associations of fagus oriantalis lipsky in different vertical classes in intact beech forests. data collection was done in 25 ha plot in gorazbon district of educational and experimental forests of university of tehran. species and dbh of all trees with dbh > 7.5 cm were recorded. the location of each tree was determined using azimuth and distanc...

Random forests are a scheme proposed by Leo Breiman in the 2000’s for building a predictor ensemble with a set of decision trees that grow in randomly selected subspaces of data. Despite growing interest and practical use, there has been little exploration of the statistical properties of random forests, and little is known about the mathematical forces driving the algorithm. In this paper, we ...

Random Forests are a popular and powerful machine learning technique, with several fast multi-core CPU implementations. Since many other machine learning methods have seen impressive speedups from GPU implementations, applying GPU acceleration to random forests seems like a natural fit. Previous attempts to use GPUs have relied on coarse-grained task parallelism and have yielded inconclusive or...

The JMLR study Do we need hundreds of classifiers to solve real world classification problems? benchmarks 179 classifiers in 17 families on 121 data sets from the UCI repository and claims that “the random forest is clearly the best family of classifier”. In this response, we show that the study’s results are biased by the lack of a held-out test set and the exclusion of trials with errors. Fur...

Although the rise of "big data" has made machine learning algorithms more visible and relevant for social scientists, they are still widely considered to be "black box" models that are not well suited for substantive research: only prediction. We argue that this need not be the case, and present one method, Random Forests, with an emphasis on its practical application for exploratory analysis a...